Sometimes 3 (or more) people have agreed an incorrect ID, so when a correct ID is added it immediately becomes a maverick. Observations on which this has happened are ones for which more sets of eyes are desirable - is there a means of finding observations with a taxonomic group in which the last identification is a maverick?
Does the new Disagreements filter help ?
https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?&category=maverick
All the Mavericks, but then you would have to sort them somehow.
getting exactly this would require some scripting with the API. (i’m not aware of anyone having built something already to find exactly this.) but this is one way to sort of find these using available third party tools without too much extra work: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/maverick-first-or-maverick-last/62857/3.
Not an answer to your question, but perhaps valuable to know when you are the one adding that fourth ID that automatically becomes maverick: by voting ‘Yes’ on the Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon be improved?, the Research Grade disappears and the observation returns to ‘needs ID’.
That is actually very good to know, thank you, since I am on occasion the one adding a 4th maverick ID.
If you are adding a Proud Maverick ID, and you @mention another taxon specialist from your circle – with 2 of you (against 3) the obs will revert to Needs ID at a broader taxon.
I also check if the 3 are still active. Otherwise the CID algorithm will demand 7 of you against the 3.
This is an URL from someone on the Forum – where I have an ID and there is DISagreement with me. (Replace my name with yours)
There were a few when I first checked it. 29.5K Reviewed but almost all not via this link.
But that kind of feels like exploiting the system for something it isn’t supposed to be doing. Imagine there are 10 people who have voted one ID and then a troll comes along and says “community taxon can be improved” just to revoke research grade status. Of course, when we genuinely think this shouldn’t be research grade, then we are acting with good intention, but it would still breaking rules.
then we are not breaking the rules. I do however prefer not to use that option myself. But for a taxon specialist (needs dissection, lab work, microscope) it is following iNat guidelines.
This is how many iNatters have used the function for many years. However, I was told last year that doing this is a violation of iNaturalist rules and that I must undo cases where I have done this in the past. As far as I am aware, I am the only person who did this to whom this has been communicated. Just an FYI.
Seriously? How is one supposed to find all the instances where that option was used in the past to undo them? That seems impossible. I know some people prefer to just use the “no” option but I just marked “can be improved” on a bunch of observations where I ended up maverick for disagreeing with IDs that had erroneously made it to RG and it was still RG after I added my disagreement. Sure, both yes or no can be abused, but that applies to a lot of other DQA items as well. If it’s used with good intentions, I don’t see any problems with using the tools given to us.
I would say this is exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.
The evidence shows species A. The Community Taxon says it’s species B, because of several wrong IDs. So, the question Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon be improved? has a very clear answer: yes, it can be improved, because it is currently wrong.
All this does, is remove the Research Grade status, making it more easily visible again to identifiers. It’s really just a lazy shortcut to personally tagging (specialist) identifiers to rectify the ID. But that may just be necessary after all, if one of the original identifiers votes ‘no’, thus restoring the (wrong) Research Grade status.
And that’s really all that would happen: the observation would lose its Research Grade status, but no harm is done. The Community Taxon is still the same, and the observation is still visible to everyone. In fact, since it lost the RG status, it would become visible again to identifiers and thus get more attention.
A troll could literally abuse any other feature to seriously damage the observation. Messing with most of the other DQA features would result in the observation becoming casual, making it instantly invisible unless people specifically search for it. Or adding a wrong ID on purpose would cause the Community Taxon to change (if there are only two identifiers so far).
Is this really a rule, though? That seems very counterintuitive. Why would we have this feature if we can’t use it? (I understand we can use it to vote ‘no’ when the organism can’t be identified to species level, for example, so the observation becomes RG at genus level. But surely the feature wasn’t meant only to vote ‘no’, was it?)
there are lots of things that people do that have the potential to irritate other people, even if the system technically allows such actions, and even if the maverick identification ultimately proves to be correct.
in my experience, given 3 bad identifications, it’s extremely likely that at least 1 of those identifiers will correct or withdraw their bad identifications if they see a better maverick identification come through, and it’s also likely for other identifiers to add additional correct identifications if made aware of the observation. so someone adding a “can be improved = yes” vote instead of waiting for one of the other two alternatives to play out just feels less ideal to me – like someone telling you that you should do something that you are already in the process of doing.
I understand your point and I can see that some people would feel irritated. If you’re someone that always checks all updates and goes back to correct wrong IDs, this may feel like you’re being rushed.
My experience is often quite the opposite, though. Often, the three persons agreeing with each other’s ID are classmates, who only used iNat once for a school project and never since. Or they’re mass identifiers who go through thousands of IDs, switched off updates and never check their IDs again. This is especially the case when there are two identifiers who are competing for the number one spot. In this case, you have the observer and two mass identifiers. The latter two never check again, and the observer doesn’t change anything because two people with many IDs agreed with their ID, so oviously the maverick must be wrong. And many of these observations are very old, so the identifiers may not even be active anymore.
Long story short: I have added quite some maverick IDs to observations and have usually seen zero activity for months or years afterwards.
I agree with you, but if this is the case, and you push the observation back to NID, chances are the next person who looks at it will be another mass identifier, who isn’t going to put any more work into their ID than the first 2 did.
I used to shepherd observations to RG with the correct ID - it can be a lot of work. Now I just make sure that my ID is correct, provide an explanation when I think it might do some good, and I don’t worry about the rest.
Have been on iNat for years. Heading for a quarter of a million IDs.
Have. Never. Seen ‘2 identifiers competing for number one spot’.
I see specialists doing a taxon sweep, the numbers rack up, they are maintaining the quality of their data, and I see evidence of an active taxon specialist.
Maybe I should elaborate on what I mean by ‘mass identifier’: someone who goes over all observations of a certain species and adds an ID, whether that observation is a few days old and only has one ID, or seven years old with five IDs already. Since they don’t depend on observations being RG or not, chances are they’ve already dealt with this observation.
@DianaStuder Of course I can’t say what really motivates people, and I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but I’ve seen this^ behavior several times. Every now and then my updates page gets flooded for about a week with updates of someone going over all observations of one species, adding their ID, only to be joined within days by another identifier doing the same (not necessarily mavericks, just in general). I can’t say what’s going on, but to me that strongly feels like those two are somehow competing.
Next time you see that happen – look at their profile. Taxon specialist ? Also the taxonomy history – a recent split, swap, correcting an error in the ‘valid’ name, a new sp described ? They may still be a team of taxon specialists doing a taxon sweep, maintaining their data.
For my slice of iNat I see it with proteas, where from the outside looking in, you may blame me for racking up IDs. Almost 15K
Or for the monotypic Genus project. 8.6K where I am an Admin
Or – sigh – another honeybee. That adds up to a lot of obs and lot of IDs ! 194K for THE taxon specialist
But I would not add another ID if 2 or 3 reliable identifiers already agree to RG.
If you see behaviour that looks doubtful, you can flag it.
If that bothers you, while we wait for better notification management – I unfollow each obs as soon as I reach – been there, done that, do NOT want to see this again !
Ok, that isn’t what I was thinking. What I was thinking of was more along the lines of what I sometimes call “drive by” identifiers. These are folks from far outside my region, who aren’t taxon specialists, but seem to drop in from time to time to do a few identifications, and then disappear again for a while. They don’t have local knowledge and don’t seem to follow up on disagreements. They probably think they are helping.
I guess I’m what you call a mass identifier - sort of. I have reviewed pretty much all the observations for my taxon/region of interest. For RG observations whose IDs I agreed with, I used to just mark them as “reviewed”. Long story, but as of this year, I decided to change my MO and now I put my own ID on every observation that I regard as “good”, regardless of how many IDs it may already have. I do this because the tools available for identifiers to keep track of their work are limited (I’ve raised a feature request for a suggested enhancement, but I’m not holding my breath).
So before 2026, it looks as though I only put IDs on observations that needed them (either to push them to RG or to correct a misidentification). A few years from now, it might look like I’m one of your mass identifiers who adds IDs to observations that are already RG (though not many would be “old”, as I tend to keep up with the inflow of new observations).